Reflectance spectra of the boreal forest over mineralized sites

Abstract

Detecting areas of near surface mineralization from spectral reflectance of geochemically stressed vegetation is very challenging in Canada's boreal forest region. This paper provide an analysis of the field spectra of two boreal forest species growing on mineralized areas. Our results show that there is little difference in reflectance between the mineralized and background sites. Less than 1.5 nm difference at the red edge inflection point was observed between the mineralized and background sites. This indicates that the differences in geochemical values are not large enough to produce significant spectral variations between sites. Therefore, detection from airborne spectrometers will be difficult.